Description: The long-awaited continuation of the swashbuckling series begun in The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After. Two hundred years after Adron's Disaster, the Empire isn't what it used to be. Deprived at a single blow of their Emperor, of the Orb that is the focus of the Empire's power, of their capital city with its Imperial bureaucracy, and of a great many of their fellow-citizens, the surviving Dragaerans have been limping through a long Interregnum, bereft even of the simple magic and sorcery they were accustomed to use in everyday life. The descendants and successors of the great adventures Khaavren, Pel, Aerich, and Tazendra, are growing up in this diminished world, convinced, like their elders, that the age of adventure is over and nothing interesting will ever happen to them. They are, of course, wrong. For, even deprived of magic, Dragaerans fight, plot, and conspire as they breathe, and so do their still-powerful gods. The enemies of the Empire prowl at its edges, inscrutable doings are up at Dzur Mountain...and, unexpectedly, a surviving Phoenix Heir, young Zerika, is discovered--setting off a chain of swashbuckling events that will remake the world yet again.

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